Eric Adams is a legal historian with a penchant for constitutional and employment law. He’s also a Dal grad.

Try out “Errors of Fact and Law: Race, Space, and Hockey in Christie v. York” (2012) 62 UTLJ

The piece might best be characterized as legal geography. It bucks the trend of minimizing the significance of facts by stopping squarely on them and lingering. Eric’s tracked through the political, economic, and social context of the case, digging through discovery and court transcripts. He’ll take you from Christie the man, to nature of hockey in communities in Montreal in the 1930s and 40s, to Canada’s Olympic boxing hopeful, Raymond Clifford McIntyre. There are great stories along the way, including in the conclusion which draws out, only briefly, something of the lives of the advocates in the case.

A teaser:

“If hockey was a game that made the nation, then boxing was the sport that threatened to tear it apart. Set against the backdrop of racial violence in the United States, in the summer of 1936, on the eve of Berlin’s racially-charged Olympic Games, a boxing tournament infused the York tavern with new rules and meanings about who belonged.”